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problem eight years sooner!*3, Between 2007 and 2015 the number of connections a
Hillis-style neural computer could handle grew from 1 million to 100 billion. This
speed did produce things very like science fiction: Accurate voice recognition. Real-
time genetics. And it also began to mark out, clearly, the powerful network territory
where our future will be decided.
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Of all the things that mark a change between our modern lives and the days of those
who came before us, few are as sensationally obvious as the sheer acceleration of
life, the reduction of delay and the emerging instantness of experience. Faster. What
is going on inside the machines, as Mel Conway’s old law would have told us, is
happening too on the surface of our lives. A feeling of breathlessness in the face of
speed isn’t new, of course. When Anna Karenina folds herself under an oncoming
train at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, for instance, her suicide is as much metaphor as
personal tragedy, a comment on the disorienting steam, engine, and rail pace of
modernity. Speed kills, old habits and ideas particularly. Between 1840 and 1940
travel times between Anna’s St. Petersburg and Vronsky’s Moscow shrunk by 10
minutes every year on average, loosing deep cracks in Russian economics and
politics, tearing apart Anna’s slow-moving world of glittering balls and hereditary
estates with the fast force of industry, modernity and then the awful pliers of
communism. Tolstoy’s own death in 1910 held a bit of this acute tension between
old and new velocities: At 82, hoping to live out his final days in the peace of a small
hut, he left his family for the rural Russian town of Sharmardino. By train. He died at
a station on the way, stopped quite literally, like an absurd figure in a Gogol novel, as
he was enacting the tragedy of trying to use the modern to get to the past.
At the same time in the late 19 Century, the American rail system was working its
own transformation, but with almost no ambivalence. America was using the
modern to get to the future - as fast as possible. This was a decisive difference in
temperament. “The American frontier,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his
famous 1894 essay about borders and American life, “is sharply distinguished from
the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense
populations.”1% American rails and roads (and trade) encountered no substantial
fortifications. They ran nearly unchecked into the wilderness. The only apparent
limit to expansion, that generation thought, was technology itself. The trains had,
from the start, an unusual purchase in American life. During the three decades after
1840, the refinement of small but important details - faster train engines, stiffer
carriage design, tracks that were straighter, an ability to move and re-load boxcars
at night, better time-table management - eased America into the steam engine age
193 You can solve: Adam Beberg lecture “Distributed Systems: Computation with a
million friends”, speech at Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (April
30, 2008) available online
195 “The American frontier”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History”, The Annual Report of the American Historical
Association, 1894, pp. 119-227
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